Shawn McCarthy of Government Computing News outlines a few trends for federal government spending for 2014 in the article Government IT in 2014: More connections, more exposure, more risk. Several have obvious parallels in Canada, but there’s a dearth of hard numbers about Canadian government cloud adoption to compare with American trends.

Patterns for cloud adoption in the U.S. government are necessarily very different from the private sector. Because of security needs, private cloud spending outnumbers public cloud spending by 20 to one, a trend McCarthy doesn’t expect to change soon.

And while software-as-a-service is the most popular solution type in the private sector, infrastructure as a service dominates. IaaS will account for about two-thirds of U.S. government cloud spending by 2017, by McCarthy’s reckoning.

That year seems to be a watershed in McCarthy’s calculations; while cloud spending will reach $1.7 billion next year, or 3.3 per cent of the IT budget, that number will grow to $7.7 by 2017.

Dave Webb is a freelance editor and writer. A veteran journalist of more than 20 years' experience (15 of them in technology), he has held senior editorial positions with a number of technology publications. He was honoured with an Andersen Consulting Award for Excellence in Business Journalism in 2000, and several Canadian Online Publishing Awards as part of the ComputerWorld Canada team.

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